You inspire the artists. We organise the retreat.
You’ve built a community around your art. Perhaps your followers regularly ask about workshops, courses or opportunities to learn from you in person. You love the idea of spending a week painting, creating and teaching somewhere beautiful, but organising accommodation, suppliers, payments, customer enquiries and travel logistics isn't what you signed up for.
That’s where Olive & Plum comes in.
We partner with established artists to create professionally organised art retreats in beautiful destinations, taking care of the operational side of the retreat so that you don’t have to.
You focus on promoting the retreat to your audience and delivering an inspiring creative experience. We take care of what happens behind the scenes.
What Olive & Plum takes care of...
Our team can manage the retreat from initial planning right through to delivery, including:
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Carefully selected and vetted retreat venues
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Trusted local suppliers and partners
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Accommodation arrangements
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Supplier bookings and communications
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Supplier contracts and payments
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Customer bookings and payments
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Customer enquiries and administration
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Pre-departure information and communications
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Financial administration
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Retreat logistics and planning
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Support for guests before departure
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An Olive & Plum team member accompanying the retreat to provide on the ground support
We don't simply find a venue and leave you to it. Our retreat locations and suppliers are carefully researched and vetted, and we build our programmes around places and partners we know can deliver the experience our artists and guests expect.
What you do
The enjoyable bit. Share the retreat with your followers and community, fill the places and deliver the creative programme.
You remain at the heart of the retreat. Your art, teaching style, personality and relationship with your audience are what make the experience special.
Olive & Plum provides the professional infrastructure around you to make it happen.
Experience you can rely on
A successful retreat involves considerably more than finding a beautiful villa and selling a few rooms. Behind every Olive & Plum retreat is a team with decades of combined experience in tour operating, travel, art workshops and creative retreats.
We understand both sides of the experience: what artists need in order to teach successfully and what guests expect when investing in a premium art holiday. We also understand the responsibility that comes with taking customer payments and delivering a travel experience.
Olive & Plum is ABTOT bonded, providing financial protection for customer payments in accordance with our bonding arrangements.
It means you can offer your audience an exciting retreat experience without having to build the operational infrastructure of a tour company around your art business.
Experience you can rely on
Trusted by Artists
We have had the pleasure of working with a growing community of talented professional artists, each bringing their own style, expertise and audience.
Past and present artists we have worked with include Jane Davies, Tom Shepherd, Jess Pritchard, Carla Grace, Lindsay Pritchard and Katarzyna Kmiecik, among others.
They bring the creativity, teaching and connection with their audience. We provide the experience, infrastructure and support that makes the retreat or workshops possible.
Some of the Artists We Work With
You don't have to become a retreat organiser
This is perhaps the biggest reason artists choose to work with us.
Running your own retreat can mean suddenly finding yourself responsible for deposits, room allocations, dietary requirements, supplier contracts, cancellations, customer questions, payment schedules and countless logistical details.
That's a very different job from being an artist. With Olive & Plum, it remains our job, not yours. You can concentrate on your audience, getting your followers to join your event, your teaching and creating an unforgettable week for the people who have travelled to learn from you.
And when you arrive, we're still there
Our involvement doesn't stop once everyone has paid. A member of the Olive & Plum team accompanies the retreat to help manage the practical side of the experience, liaise with venues and suppliers and support guests. So while you're teaching, you shouldn't also have to worry about whether the transport has arrived, who's spoken to the restaurant or whether a guest has a question about tomorrow's arrangements. We take care of the retreat around you.
Part of a wonderful creative community
Olive & Plum is about more than individual retreats. Over the years, we've built a wonderful community of professional artists, tutors and supporting artists who help us create the warm, inspiring experiences our guests return for. We're incredibly grateful for our talented team of supporting artists, including Jaime Moore, Sharon Gibson, Laura Jayne Smith, Andrew Hemming, Jan Baybutt and Heather Teague, many of whom join us on retreats to support our lead artists and guests and help everything run smoothly. Many of our supporting artists also deliver their own workshops with Olive & Plum Academy at our UK studio, giving artists another way to become part of the Olive & Plum community.
Not ready for a full retreat?
A retreat doesn't always have to be the first step. Our spacious and beautiful UK Art studio, located next to the River Severn in Worcestershire, provides a wonderful opportunity for artists to run smaller workshops with Olive & Plum, get to know our team and introduce their teaching to our creative community before considering a larger retreat.
For some artists, this becomes a natural journey: UK workshop → develop your Olive & Plum audience → host a UK or overseas retreat
Whether you're already an established artist with an audience ready to travel, or you'd simply like to explore what working together could look like, we'd love to hear from you.
Could you host an Olive & Plum workshop or retreat?
We're interested in hearing from established artists who have an engaged audience and would love to take their community somewhere beautiful.
You might already run successful workshops or online courses. You might have a substantial social media following or mailing list. Or perhaps your audience has been asking you to run a workshop or retreat and you've simply never wanted to take on the logistics yourself.
If that sounds like you, we'd love to start a conversation.
There doesn't need to be a finished retreat idea. Tell us a little about you, your art, your audience and which of our locations you are most interested in.
You bring the art and the audience. We'll help make the retreat happen.
Interested in working with us?
We'd love to hear from you. Please complete the form below and we will be in touch soon :)
